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Synchrotron X-ray tomographic quantification of microstructural evolution in ice cream - a multiphase soft solid

Guo, E; Zeng, G; Kazantsev, D; Rockett, P; Bent, J; Kirkland, M; Van Dalen, G; ... Lee, PD; + view all (2017) Synchrotron X-ray tomographic quantification of microstructural evolution in ice cream - a multiphase soft solid. RSC Advances , 7 (25) pp. 15561-15573. 10.1039/c7ra00642j. Green open access

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Abstract

Microstructural evolution in soft matter directly influences not only the material's mechanical and functional properties, but also our perception of that material's taste. Using synchrotron X-ray tomography and cryo-SEM we investigated the time–temperature evolution of ice cream's microstructure. This was enabled via three advances in synchrotron tomography: a bespoke tomography cold stage; improvements in pink beam in line phase contrast; and a novel image processing strategy for reconstructing and denoising in line phase contrast tomographic images. Using these three advances, we qualitatively and quantitatively investigated the effect of thermal changes on the ice cream's microstructure after 0, 7 and 14 thermal cycles between −15 and −5 °C. The results demonstrate the effect of thermal cycling on the coarsening of both the air cells and ice crystals in ice cream. The growth of ice crystals almost ceases after 7 thermal cycles when they approach the size of the walls between air cells, while air cells continue to coarsen, forming interconnected channels. We demonstrate that the tomographic volumes provide a statistically more representative sample than cryo-SEM, and elucidate the three dimensional morphology and connectivity of phases. This resulted in new insights including the role of air cells in limiting ice crystal coarsening.

Type: Article
Title: Synchrotron X-ray tomographic quantification of microstructural evolution in ice cream - a multiphase soft solid
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1039/c7ra00642j
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/c7ra00642j
Language: English
Additional information: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Mechanical Engineering
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10049154
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